Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Well, we finally decided that we're not going to be able to fix the shopping cart without help, and paid the company that made it to just go take care of it.

They told us yesterday that they had, but this is a new definition of "fixed" that means I can get into it again from my end, but none of the products that already had definitions in the cart are working at all. And nothing I do seems to make them work. Sigh.

So we're still struggling with it, and in the meantime, it's still down.

If you'd like to place an order, please call me at 1-877-ROBIN WOOD. I'm still sick, so if I'm not at my desk, please leave a message on the machine. I'll call you back as soon as I can.

Once again, I'm really sorry for the inconvenience, and really, really hope this is fixed soon!

Saturday, January 26, 2008

I have the Valentine's candy "Talking Hearts" out in all my stores in SL.

You know those chalky little hearts with stuff printed on them that you can get in Real Life? Well, now you can have them in Second Life, too!

They come in little square boxes that have an animation so you can hold them in your left hand. If you touch the box, it gives you a random piece of candy from a pool of 24 pieces. If you find the candy in your Inventory and Wear it, you will hold it up in your right hand for a moment and look at it. While you do that, the candy reads itself in open chat, so everyone can enjoy the saying on it. Then you pop it into your mouth, and the candy disappears.

You can only eat a single piece one time, so you may as well delete it after you've eaten it. But you can always take another. There's an unlimited supply of them in the box!

There are also special boxes for your Lover, Mother, Father, Sister or Brother, with six special sayings just for them!

I'm afraid that only the owner can take candy, because of the limitations of the Permissions System in Second Life. But at only L$100 a box, you can afford to get your friends their own! On sale now, at all Kick the Can stores, and at Robin (Sojourner) Wood's AV Store

Saturday, January 19, 2008

The good news is that the site has been migrated, and no longer shows a blank "News" page, and all the links and so on appear to be working. I can also add things to it now, and all of that good stuff.

The bad news is that the shopping cart is completely offline. Michael says that's probably because our User ID has changed, internally, and he's going to get the people who make the Shopping Cart to migrate the certificate, and tell him what we need to change (or change it themselves) or whatever needs to be done to get up and working again. But, since it's now a weekend, and Monday is a holiday here in the states (Martin Luther King Day) it's unlikely that anything is going to happen before Tuesday, at the earliest.

So, once again, if you would like to place an order, I'm afraid that you'll have to phone it in until we get back up again.

I'm really, really sorry for the inconvenience, and grateful for your patience.

Like the older flannel shirts I've done, these are seamless (except where you'd see seams on a real shirt) and have several variations; buttoned up and tucked in, or unbuttoned and untucked, both with rolled sleeves, or buttoned cuffs.

However, unlike the old ones, and due to popular demand, they have an additional variation; buttoned up and untucked, with the 2 sleeve variations, of course.

All the untucked shirts are on the jacket layer, of course, and the tucked ones are on the Jacket, Shirt, and Undershirt for maximum layering flexibility. Which means that counting all the variations, there are ten shirts in the pack!

Also unlike the old ones, the new ones are Mod/Copy/No Transfer. So if you want to buy them for someone else, please use the Gift button on the vendor.

We're still having web hosting problems, and our provider seems very reluctant to fix any of them.

Latest problem; I tried to change the "News" page on the front of the old site, so that it would tell people not to use the broken Shopping Cart. But it wouldn't save, since they say I'm over my alloted disk space, and instead of doing nothing, it replaced the page with a blank one. So now the front page of the site is blank. Which, I'm hoping, will at least let people know there is something wrong.

The guys at the Hosting service, while being adamant that they couldn't put that one small file on the site (they suggested that I tear half of it down, instead, which I think would be even worse) admitted that the "transparent" move from one machine to the other, which they charged a hefty fee for, didn't include pointing the DNS at the new machine. So we told them to go ahead and do that, and they assured us that it would be complete within 24 hours.

As I write this, it's been 48, (which was the outside limit in the e-mail they sent) and it's still pointing at the old one. Michael is on the phone with them right now, trying to figure out what is going on.

But, in the meantime, please accept my apology for the site being basically broken, with the front page blank and the Shopping Cart borked. And please, please, if you are reading this, and you placed an order with an invoice number between I01541 and I01546, give me a call or e-mail me. Your order arrived totally blank.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

I've been having web hosting problems since I last posted, which is why I stopped posting.

Briefly, my web host has been bought and sold a number of times since my original contract, and somewhere along the line, my disk allotment was cut drastically. I didn't realize this had happened; and someplace between Jan. 5 and Jan. 8, they decided to "enforce" the new size. The first I heard of it was when I tried to upload an image for the blog on Jan. 8, and was unable to. They informed me that I would have to cut my site by 45%, or get a new contract.

After several days of going back and forth (during most of which I was too sick to really care, or follow anything) we've decided to change our service with the same company for three months (the minimum time we can do so without paying a stiff penalty.) We're actually paying less per month now, for better service, with plenty of room for anything I need to post. And we have three months to really examine all the other service providers out there, and see where we'd like to go "for keeps."

The only thing that's still not working is the shopping cart; so please, don't place an order on my site right now, and if you have placed one in the last few days, please contact me.

I'll post as soon as we get it working again.

In the meantime, I'm able to post pictures once more, so here's the eyes that I finished last week!

Saturday, January 05, 2008

I'm still pretty sick, even though I've been on Keflex for days now; so things that should take a single day are taking two (or more!)

But I have managed to get the bears out, and in vendors in all my Kick the Can stores.

That was yesterday, although I was too whipped to post about it.

Today, I got 36 pairs of new Worn Jeans out.

It took me about half an hour to make all the jeans variations (they are based on the Kid's Dirty Jeans, but without the Dirt, and in lots more colors.) Then it took about 10 hours to make the vendor objects to sell them from. Gah. I wish there was a better way to sell clothing in SL!

But they are done now, and ready for you to grab, in my my main AV Store at Livingtree (104, 128, 24).

You have your choice of nine different colors of denim, with four different thread colors, for L$50. Or you can buy all the thread colors of any one denim color for L$150, or all the denim colors in a single thread color for L$300.

I think you'll like these, assuming you want a pair of jeans that's throughly "broken in." There are lots of details; "whiskers" on the front pockets, a hole in the knee that you can see your skin through, and a smaller one in the back, lots of worn patches, and frayed cuffs.

You'll also find that you never have to worry about the "V-Chunk" in the bottom hem. The way I make jeans, it just doesn't happen. (You might have some irregularity in the hem if the jeans aren't fully rezzed, but that's a different issue, and will go away once they are.)

They are mod/copy/no transfer, so you can make as many length, looseness, and tint variations as you like. I'm also providing them both as Pants and Underpants, so you should be able to layer them, wear them tucked in to your favorite pair of boots etc. fairly easily.

Thursday, January 03, 2008

As you can see, they use the same Sculpty base as the Limited Sales Date Holiday bear, but, of course, they are quite different in the details.

For one thing, these guys have bows, not hats and scarves, and the bows have a color-changing script, so you can make them any one of 12 colors by picking from the menu. (Or infinitely more, by selecting the prims and tinting them, of course. The bears are Copy/Mod, after all. :D )

Like the Holiday Bears, you can move the arms and legs very much the way you would be able to with a real bear. I mean, a real toy bear. Attempting to move the arms and legs of real live bears is not recommended!

Anyway, the bears themselves are done now, and if I can get pictures made, and vendors together, they will be out in the various Kick the Can stores by tomorrow!

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Haven't done much the last week, and I don't know how much I'll be getting done this week, either.

I seem to have come down with what the doctor (yes, I was feeling horrible enough that I actually went to one) assures me is not the flu, but is a bacterial infection. He put me on Keflex, and says I should be feeling well in a couple of days.